Thursday, April 25, 2019, T+13 -- Phrase Of The Day -- "Platform Company"

Big day on the market today: F and SBUX report.

Phrase of the day: platform company. Will come back to this later.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

The market, before the open:

• WTI: just above $66
• Dow: down 70 points but during the night it was down over a 100 points
• F: flat at $9.57
• SBUX: up 26 cents; at $76.65
• FB: up 9% in pre-market trading; up $16.33
• XLNX: down $14; down 10% after missing estimates; fascinating story; more on this later; transcript here; news here; AP note here;
• SM earnings expected to decline; results should be released May 1, 2018
• COP: up 30 cents; at $64
• CVX: up 45 cents; at $118.73; had a significant pullback earlier this week when OXY offered a counterbid for Anadarko
• OXY: down 55 cents, at $61.45, about where it's been before all this started
• Anadarko: up $7.41 yesterday, up 11.6%; closed at $71.40; this morning unchanged
• SRE: no trading yet
• UNP: no trading yet

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Speech Recognition

Mother Nature had the same problem as computers do today when it comes to recognizing speech.

From The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker, c. 1994, page 163:

The problems Mother Nature faced are digital-to-analog conversion when the talker encodes strings of discrete symbols into a continuous stream of sound, and analog-to-digital conversion when the listener decodes continuous speech back into discrete symbols. 

From page 162:

The physical and neural machinery of speech is a solution to two problems in the design of the human communication system. A person might know 60,000 words, but a person's mouth cannot make 60,000 different noises (at least not ones that the ear can easily discriminate).

So language has exploited the principle of the discrete combinatorial system again.

Sentences and phrases are built out of words, words are built out of morphemes, and morphemes, in turn, are built out of phonemes.

Unlike words and morphemes, though, phonemes do not contribute bits of meaning to the whole. The meaning of dog is not predictable from the meaning of d, the meaning of o, the meaning of g, and their order. Phonemes are a different kind of linguistic object. They connect outward to speech, not inward to mentalese: a phoneme corresponds to an act of making a sound. A division into independent discrete combinatorial systems, one combining meaningless sounds into meaningful morphemes into meaningful words, phrases, and sentences is a fundamental design feature of human language, which the linguist Charles Hockett has called "duality of patterning."